Am Sonntag, 10. Mai 2015, 19:55:09 schrieb Gez:
[...]
I would like to know how does it work for inkscape to do something along the lines of what Ardour does: Charging for the binaries. The GPL license doesn't prohibit that and the source code would be available to anyone willing to build the program themselves, but he money could be used for paying packagers, developers and code reviewers.
Does Inkscape actually provide binaries? Or is it the packagers' private fun and Inkscape just hosts them?
It would be interesting to let users choose how their payment is used in the project (like www.humblebundle.com lets you choose where the money goes and you can select which percentage goes to the developers, to the site and to charity). Something similar would allow people to choose if they want their money to be used for supporting inkscape for their chosen platform, for new features, bugfixing, hackfests, for using at Inkscape board's discresion, etc.
I would be very careful with letting donators decide how the money gets spent. While that might make people happy and more willing to part with their cash it has the inherent problem that only sexy and shiny new toys get support while the boring but in general way more important grunt work (cleaning up the code, building infrastructure, refactoring, you name it) gets neglected. Or do you think anyone would tick "spent my donation for C++ification" on the donation page? No. They would ask for "multi page files" and "animation". Which is nice to have but less important for the project. So I would suggest to only allow people to put money into one big box and rely on the board to distribute the money. If they decide to fund bling that's cool, but at least they will most likely not forget about priorities.
[...]
Gez.
Tobias